Over the last six decades, Asia's participation in population mobility on the global stage has advanced in unprecedented ways. Today, Asia sustains two-thirds of the world's population and is the origin of 40 per cent of the world's international migrants (IOM, 2019). Intraregional migration has grown rapidly and accounts for more than half of Asian migrants on the move (66 million), while extra-regional migrants number around 44.6 million (IOM, 2019: 68). A vast region of great complexity and enormous diversity, Asia's massive social transformation, economic development and demographic change are inextricably linked to new understandings and practices centring migration as a social force for change. Accompanying the rise of migration in Asia as a vital transformative force, migration research in the Asian context has not only grown in volume and substance, but also carved out its own distinctive contours in response to the lived reality of a dynamic region. This is a shifting kaleidoscopic region grappling with a shared history of colonialism and postcolonial nation-building, and at the same time riven by the incommensurability of immense socio-economic inequality, deep-seated cultural difference and wide divergence in political regimes. Against such variance and variegations in the region, summarising even the key developments in migration research in Asia would take much more than a short commentary. Instead, my task is much more focused on spotlighting distinctive contributions illustrating how an empirical concentration on Asia has organically advanced conceptual understandings in the field of international migration. This task is not inspired by strains of Asian exceptionalism but more akin to Chen’s (2010: 212) “Asia as method,” where anchoring research in Asia practically and imaginatively creates “each other's points of reference, so that … the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilised to provide alternative horizons and perspectives.” As a small and tentative step towards materialising the postcolonial desire to “theorise from the South, rather than just use the South as a testing ground for theories based on the experience of the North” (Chua et al., 2019: 42), I examine three themes that have animated migration research in Asia: postcolonial nation-building and temporary migration; feminisation of migration, transnational family and cross-border marriage; and the migration industry and migration infrastructures. When large-scale labour migration within the region started in the 1970s, many Asian countries – including several which had only recently cut their colonial apron strings – were still in the process of consolidating projects of nation-state building (Asis & Battistella, 2012: 31). Nation-building projects in Asia differ both from the European model based on homogeneity and common heritage, as well as the North American and Australasian settler colonies featuring versions of multiculturalism that privilege “white” subjects as the core of the nation. Southeast Asian postcolonial nation states such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore strained towards welding together a nation state from “an already existing plurality” rooted in the diasporas and people movements of colonial times, while East Asian polities such as Japan and South Korea constructed a sense of nationhood on the basis of idealised narratives of ethnic homogeneity that denied the presence of ethnically different others (Collins et al., 2012: 15). In Asia, most nation states wield citizenship rules as legal instruments of exclusion that sharply separates citizens and non-citizens, and the one-to-one umbilical relationship between person and state has become normalised in mainstream policy discourse in Asia. In this context, the specific labour migration system that developed in Asia was one that minimised challenges to the fragile imaginary of the nation state in the making, by rendering migrants as transient sojourners whose place in host societies is to sell their labour but make no claims on the receiving nation state. In other words, the migration regime that emerged in Asia was premised on keeping migration temporary, and apart from creating a privileged pathway for highly skilled migrants to gain residency and citizenship, most Asian receiving nation states “rule[d] out settlement, family reunification and long-term integration, including acquisition of citizenship, for less-skilled migrants” (Asis & Battistella, 2012: 32). At the same time, sending states such as the Philippines and Indonesia also encourage temporariness and eventual return of their citizen-sojourners abroad in order to secure remittance flows, homeward investments and transnational linkages. While migration pathways to permanency are narrowing worldwide,1. temporary migration has been the mainstay of transnational labour circulation in Asia from the start. Research on temporary migration regimes in Asia – from the work permit system in labour-short global cities such as Singapore to the kafala system in the Gulf states – has been particularly productive of important insights in at least three lines of research. First, while there is a tendency to rely on western-centric paradigms based on assumptions of assimilation, multiculturalism and integration in exploring the place of the migrant in host society (Pagès-El Karoui & Yeoh, 2020), notions of “enforced transience” or “permanent temporariness” that is written into prominent temporary migration schemes in Asia have opened up a different vein of research on the precarious conditions under which low-waged migrant workers are permitted to labour but not stay in host societies. As non-citizen workers accorded “temporary” status, these migrant workers invariably experience constraints on length of stay and employment mobility, face stigmatisation, discrimination and xenophobia, and have diminished access to social protection, family migration and pathways to longer-term residency (Hewison & Young, 2005; Parreñas et al., 2020; Withers & Piper, 2022; Yea, 2021; Yeoh et al., 2017; Yeoh, Goh, et al., 2020). Second, the rise of temporary migration in Asia and the increasing presence of transient migrants have spawned new research on the place of the migrant in host society. While traditional models of migration and settlement based in western contexts often measure the degree of integration of ethnically differentiated immigrant groups by their levels of social, economic and political participation in host society vis-à-vis the “native” population (Papademetriou et al., 2009), the phenomenon of temporary migration raises the conundrum of how not to integrate migrants into host society. Beyond research into ethnic residential enclaves and immigrant neighbourhoods – key indicators of social integration in white-majority countries – attending to temporary migration and diversification has instead directed attention to social and economic landscapes featuring non-residential migrant concentrations, or the so-called ephemeral “weekend enclaves” in Asia's arrival cities (Muniandy, 2015; Yeoh & Huang, 1998). Focusing on the politics of non-integration and separateness enacted through social and spatial strategies of control and containment has sharpened a different analytical lens to understanding the complex relationship between migration, diversity and (non-)integration (Yeoh, 2018). Another important strand of the literature attends to how migrant claims-making in the broader pursuit of dignity, security and mobility is enacted and challenged in the warp and woof of everyday life, not so much in the domain of legal citizenship, but through the prism of on-the-ground struggles over labour processes, civil society and community mobilisation, and the construction of symbolic boundaries separating citizens who belong from migrants who are disposable (Goh, 2019; Loong, 2018). Third, bolstered by a “triple win” migration-and-development discourse, the expansion of temporary migration schemes in recent decades is premised on “a neoliberal economic logic, where the value of individual migrants is their productive contribution to labour markets and mutual (economic) benefits for sending and receiving states” (Collins & Bayliss, 2020: 2, referencing Feldman, 2012). This logic entails a managerial approach (Collins & Bayliss, 2020) to temporary migration to ensure the transience and non-integration of labour migrants in host societies on the one hand, and the durability of remittance transfers to left-behind families and continual investment in home countries on the other. As the COVID-19 pandemic undermines easy transnational mobility and states retreat into the cocoon of economic nationalism, the sustainability of temporary migration as a panacea for development in times of stalled mobility is becoming an important topic on research agendas interested in human development (Foley & Piper, 2021; Yeoh, 2020). Temporariness is a “crucial, though little articulated, ingredient in the migration-development nexus” (Rosewarne, 2010: 103) and the pandemic has laid bare the in-built precarity of the temporary migration regime not just for migrants but also both sending and receiving nation states. In the 1970s, while Asian migration to the Middle East comprised mainly males employed in construction (Birks et al., 1988; Pongsapich, 1989; Smart et al., 1985), an increase in demand – within and beyond Asia – for female migrant workers from the 1980s has led to the increasing feminisation of contract labour in certain parts of the region such as Southeast Asia (Truong, 1996; Chantavich, 2001). For example, in response to the gender-segmented global demand for domestic and care workers, women comprise the majority of migrant workers legally deployed from the Philippines and Indonesia (Asis, 2005: 18). As Chant and Radcliffe (1992: 1) observed, such gender-differentiated migration mirrors the way “sexual divisions of labour are incorporated into spatially uneven processes of development,” becoming “a template for subsequent social and economic evolution in developing [and developed] societies.” This developmental context has given rise to a productive vein of migration research interested in the gender division of labour, transnational families, household social reproduction and social change. While migration scholarship on transnational families and household dynamics has emerged elsewhere (see Bryceson and Vuorela’s (2002) pioneering work, also Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Schmalzbauer, 2008; Mazzucato, 2015; Mazzucato & Dito, 2018), the prevalence of the temporary migration regime in Asia, especially one that operates along gender lines that divide, has spawned research opportunities that foreground gender and family issues. These include the social consequences of prolonged separation of family members, care deficits in childcare and eldercare, and changing social practices that challenge traditionally scripted roles for men and women. Two main strands of research linking gender-differentiated migration and family dynamics have been particularly prominent in the Asian context. First, gendered labour migration is altering the way households and communities function, with consequences on familial relations, the gender division of labour and the traditional (read “patriarchal”) balance of power in sending societies in Asia. The increasing participation of Southeast Asian women in migration has highlighted the need for a “family perspective” in migration studies (Yeoh et al., 2002), primarily because women are still considered the lynchpin of the Asian family, where their absence from the family tends to raise anxiety and moral censure unlike men's migration that is often normalised as masculine endeavour. These observations have led researchers to go beyond the assumption that household decisions regarding migration are guided by “principles of consensus and altruism” and instead take into account that migration decision-making may “equally be informed by hierarchies of power along gender and generational lines” (Mahler & Pessar, 2006: 33). Southeast Asian migrant women who leave their families to work abroad are simultaneously burdened by the expectations of performing long-distance mothering and care work, exalted as “heroes of foreign exchange” and also seen as in need of “protection” to preserve their sexual and moral purity for the sake of their families (Asis, 2006; ECMI/AOS-Manila, SMC and OWWA, 2004; Lam & Yeoh, 2018; Yeoh, Somaiah, et al., 2020). At the same time, the continued overseas labour migration of women is often crucial to sustaining visions of upward social mobility for the newly emerging consumerist family (Silvey, 2006). Within sending communities located at the Southern end of the global care chain, a related research theme of interest concerns the durability of the woman-carer model in the wake of increasing feminised migration. On the one hand, research has emphasised the resilience of “good mothering” ideals even when migrant mothers become remittance-sending breadwinners, leading them to draw on modern communication technologies to perform emotional care labour across distance (Graham et al., 2012; Parreñas, 2005). The gendered contours of care work in reproducing the family are also visible in the prominent role played by female relatives such as grandmothers and aunts in plugging the care deficit in the wake of mothers’ migration (Gamburd, 2000; Parreñas, 2005). As a result, the “delegation of the mother's nurturing and caring tasks to other women family members, and not the father, upholds normative gender behaviours in the domestic sphere and thereby keep the conventional gendered division of labour intact” (Hoang & Yeoh, 2011: 722). On the other hand, despite the ongoing prevalence of the woman-carer model among transnationally stretched families, left-behind men are not necessarily “missing in action,” or worst still, “delinquent fathers.” Instead, they too struggle to live up to highly moralistic masculine ideals of being both “good fathers” and “independent breadwinners,” often by reconstructing a new “package deal” of their masculine selves that builds on characteristics such as responsibility, adaptability, capability and control (Hoang & Yeoh, 2012; Lam & Yeoh, 2018). As Kofman and Raghuram (2009: 18) note, the division of care labour in society “refracts and reproduces existing social hierarchies.” In this light, the feminisation of migration and the rise of capital-poor transnational families have generated a fruitful avenue of migration research that has compelled us to rethink gender notions in the social provisioning of everyday and generational care. A second significant strand of research conjoining gendered migration and family dynamics in the Asian context focuses on the rise of marriage migration in the region. A highly gendered phenomenon in Asia is that the bulk of marriage migrants in Asia involves women from the region's poorer countries crossing borders to marry men in the wealthier economies. Cross-border marriages are householding strategies where Asian men and women engage in “transnational patriarchy” to overcome difficulties within their own national territories in order to achieve what may be considered better options for family formation. Transnational patriarchy redefines conjugal relations when women submit to relative disempowerment in order to migrate to an economically more advanced country, while men “parlay citizenship rights into patriarchal privileges within the conjugal relationship” (Jongwilaiwan & Thompson, 2013: 365). Linking family dynamics to the nation-state domain, scholars have also observed that female marriage migrants gain admission into nation states as wives and dependents of their citizen-husbands, and as biological and social reproducers of citizen-children (Kim, 2013; Sheu, 2007; Wang & Belanger, 2008; Yeoh et al., 2013). This gendered mode of familial citizenship not only restricts their autonomy within the intimate sphere of the family but also renders them partial citizens in wider society as subjects who are not entitled to residency and citizenship rights on their own terms (Chiu & Yeoh, 2021). The family domain functions as a two-edged sword, as it serves to restrict female marriage migrants’ roles to the domestic sphere while also mediating women's vulnerability and access to social mobility as newcomers and social outsiders in the host nation state (Yeoh et al., 2021). As Chiu and Yeoh (2021) conclude in a recent special issue on “Marriage Migration, Family and Citizenship in Asia,” the burgeoning research on marriage migration in Asia has opened up new ways of understanding “how nation states mobilise notions of the family for its citizenship project; how citizenship structures the trajectory and circumstances of different types of families formed out of cross-border marriages.” One of the more recent conceptual contributions arising from migration research in the Asian context is based on the observation that migration is a heavily mediated process, involving orchestration among a diverse set of actors with different motivations (Liu-Farrer & Yeoh, 2018: 7). While the term “migration industry” often connotes pejorative meanings, it alerts us to the significant roles played by a wide range of actors – brokers, recruiters, smugglers, travel agents, transport providers, humanitarian organisations, immigration lawyers and housing and placement agents – in organising, facilitating and channelling migration flows. Migration scholars working on low-skilled migration in Asia – predominantly circular, feminised and contractual – have observed the rapid growth of an ecosystem of intermediaries filling the “middle space” of migration, and this has urged attention to “opening the black box of migration” in order to “illuminate the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible” (Lindquist et al., 2012: 8). Shifting attention to the migration industry and adopting migration brokers as a methodological vantage point has proven to be a productive move in enriching the Asian migration literature in at least two ways. First, scholars interested in how migration regimes operate have argued for bringing the migration industry into the fold of state-centric migration governance analysis in order to attend to the interdependent dynamics between the state and the migration industry in controlling migration. Goh et al. (2017: 414) argue that the state orders migration through the migration industry's pursuit of profit, specifically through producing migrants as “governable legal subjects” (see also Shrestha & Yeoh, 2018). By outsourcing certain elements of migration governance functions to the migration industry while retaining regulatory authority, the state is able to save costs, ensure flexibility, avoid blame and circumvent the need for formal cooperation with migrant-sending countries (Goh et al., 2017). Second, focusing on “those who move migrants rather than the migrants themselves” has paved the way for a more effective conceptualisation of “the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible” (Lindquist et al., 2012: 9). In their seminal article on “migration infrastructures,” Xiang and Lindquist (2014: s124) delineate five dimensions of migration infrastructure: “the commercial (recruitment intermediaries), the regulatory (state apparatus and procedures for documentation, licensing, training and other purposes), the technological (communication and transport), the humanitarian (NGOs and international organisations) and the social (migrant networks).” As an emergent milieu featuring multiple forms of migration, Asia provides an important arena for understanding “how migrant mobilities are generated in concert with nascent ‘infrastructuring’ processes” (Lin et al., 2017: 171). The growing focus on migration infrastructures has spawned a wide range of new research from emigration management (Xiang, 2017), informal labour recruiters (Lindquist, 2012); licensed labour recruiters and placement agencies (Wee et al., 2020); international marriage brokerage (Yeoh et al., 2017), educational infrastructures and student mobilities (Collins, 2012; Thieme, 2017) to the political economy of transport technologies (Lin & Gleiss, 2018). This infrastructural turn in migration studies is in many ways inspired by migration research in the Asian context and, in turn, has stimulated an innovative corpus of work that foregrounds the socio-material arrangements that mediate and shape human mobilities (Lin et al., 2017; Lindquist & Xiang, 2017). In this brief commentary, I have not attempted to provide a comprehensive survey of the burgeoning literature on Asian migrations over the last six decades (for a more thoroughgoing collective effort in reviewing the field, see the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations (Liu-Farrer & Yeoh, 2018)). Instead, the approach here is to look at the specificities of Asian migration in order to decipher potentially productive apertures for more theoretically informed interventions that have invigorated the field of migration studies in Asia and beyond. Unlike migration linked to settlement in the case of liberal democratic states in the West, a large part of the migration experience in Asia is linked to a migration regime favouring human mobilities that are circular, feminised, brokered for profit and governed by time-limited contracts. It is in this context that scholars – both those based in Asia and outside Asia – have ploughed the empirical field in order to reap conceptual insights that have made a difference to the global reach of migration scholarship.